For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.